Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: John Hick, The Fifth Dimension, bahai-library.com.
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The Fifth Dimension

John Hick
pp. 85, 233

Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1999

[page 84]

... In the west this conception has always been more at home within the mystical than the ecclesiastical-doctrinal thought-world. There are historical reasons for this. Medieval Christendom was a cohesive religious culture in which the only known 'others' were the hated and despised Jews within and the hated and feared Muslims without. Christian writers (until Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century) were not usually concerned to take serious account of the realms of religious life and experience beyond their own borders. The Indian sub-continent, on the other hand, was always a multi-faith region, with the Shaivites and the Vaishnavites within what is today called Hinduism, and the Jains, Parsis, Buddhists, and later the Muslims, Christians and Sikhs all coexisting, sometimes as hostile, and even violently hostile, but most of the time as friendly, neighbours. And so the pluralistic idea has a more

[page 85]

familiar and accepted status in India and further east.

But the most explicit teaching of pluralism as religious truth comes from
the region between east and west, namely Iran (Persia). It was here that the
nineteenth-century prophet Bahá'u'lláh taught that the ultimate divine
reality is in itself beyond the grasp of the human mind, but has
nevertheless been imaged and responded to in different historically and
culturally conditioned ways by the founders of the different
faith-traditions. The Bahá'í religion which he founded continues to teach
this message in many countries today...

[page 233]

...it is the basic teaching of all the world religions that we should
behave towards others as we would wish others to behave towards us. ... [Here follow seven quotations from other religions.] ...
'Lay not on any soul a load which ye would not wish to be laid upon you, and desire not for any one the things ye would not desire for yourselves' (the Bahá'í Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh, 66, 127). ...

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